Cycling 4,700km for a Date! Bike Touring the UK & Ireland

British Isles cycle touring documentary: We cycled 4,700km through the British Isles for a movie date at Britain’s most remote cinema! Our goal: to cycle tour from Steyning, West Sussex, to the Schoolhouse Cinema on Out Skerries, in Shetland.

In this episode, we cycle along the South coast of England, and bicycle tour through the New Forest. We began adjusting to cycle touring as a couple, and to life on the road, and were already appreciating the kindness of strangers. The adventure was just beginning; neither of us had tried cycle touring in the UK, and we had no idea what lay ahead as we rode our bikes through the British countryside en route to the Shetland Islands. Cycling the UK, Isle of Man, and Ireland would take us way off the beaten track, and we’d learn about our home country and it’s neighbours through the people we’d meet along the way. And that would be the real adventure.

Big thank you to Jill for her masterful camerawork!

CONTEXT:
In 2021, Jill and I set off on an adventure; a long-distance bicycle tour from Sussex to Shetland. Cycling so far would take us over five months and show us sides of the UK and its neighbours that we’d never seen before.

Cycle touring as a couple was a first for us, and would take us through England, Wales, The Isle of Man, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, finishing on one of the most remote islands in the UK: Out Skerries, in Shetland.

Jill and I met in 2020 (just before the pandemic kicked off) and started dating in the Autumn. In late 2020, Jill moved to Greece for six months to work for a couple of NGOs, before returning home the following Spring. So we realised that, due to Covid and long-distance, we had never actually been on a proper date… this needed to change.

But we’d been locked down for months, so we couldn’t just go somewhere down the road. We needed something a little more exciting. After some googling, we found just what we needed; the most remote cinema in Britain, on Out Skerries in the Shetland islands, the northernmost reaches of the UK. The perfect spot for our very first movie date.

Catch a train, a ferry, or a plane there? No, we’d been indoors for far too long. Why not hop on our bikes for over 5 months of fresh air, and 4,700km of pedalling through every country on the British Isles instead?

00:00-00:26 – We Cycled to the most Remote Cinema in Britain
00:27-02:16 – Preparing for a Cycle Tour of Britain and Ireland
02:16-03:52 – British Isles Cycle Touring Route
03:53-05:21 – Why did we Cycle Tour?
05:22-10:27 – The Cycle Touring Adventure Begins
10:28-12:39 – Cycling the New Forest

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